Brian McLaren: Intellectual Deficit Disorder

Brian McLaren is an infamous leader in the Emergent Church movement, which is a recent and more obnoxious outcrop of church Liberalism which spawned the Evangelical Left. Among their many heretical takes on what the Bible teaches, they also profess that Israel is to be scorned. McLaren is joining the cacophony of anti-Israeli voices now that he is visiting the Palestinians and has undergone an awakening from the “well-planned propaganda” he was the victim of all his life in the states.1 This certainly brings the question of McLaren’s credibility, and even basic abilities, front and center.

Firstly, exactly how sophisticated was the campaign that kept McLaren wrongly supporting Israel, if he ever really did so, for his whole life until now (he was born in 1956)? He could not have been misled by the U.S. media all these years. They consistently portray Israel as an evil aggressor any time they take a defensive action. McLaren certainly was not misled by others of his liberal church collogues such as the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA). The PCUSA claimed that Israel was erecting an obstacle to peace by building a security wall to keep out homicide bombers, and they called for financial divestment from companies doing business with Israel in order to punish it for pursuing self-preservation.

If McLaren is the self-described dimwit he claims he was for making “basic assumptions” in which he allowed his understanding to be “skewed from a lifetime of half-truths, unfair and imbalanced news…, and misinformation,”2 how does he account for his sudden clarity? If it truly takes a change in geography and first-hand observations to enable McLaren to clearly evaluate events and accounts, is the level of McLaren’s perspicuity actually worth any serious consideration whatsoever? These are very pressing concerns because of other claims McLaren makes about himself.

McLaren claims to evaluate Christian doctrine and weigh the minds of the Apostles to prescribe new applications of scripture, based on his wisdom and insight, as he applies himself to the documents. Astoundingly, he now admits to being unable to sort through the products of basic journalism and ferret out facts from fiction. Obviously, his preexisting premises of being easily fooled and misled invalidate any claim he now makes to sound reasoning. But he’s not appealing to reason. McLaren is playing to small-minded anti-Semitism, and working for the spirit of Antichrist.